A datacenter may employ many different types of equipment. For example, the datacenter may have redundant or backup power supplies, redundant data communications connections, environmental controls (e.g., air conditioning, fire suppression) and security devices. In addition, the datacenter may have equipment for operating and managing a telecommunication network, providing applications to one or more customers, and providing hosted applications for a third-party to provide to its customers.
As the equipment in the datacenter may be costly or important to an operation (e.g., webpage hosting, Internet search and indexing, telecommunication networking, etc.), the equipment may provide telemetry information to inform the datacenter operator of the equipment's condition.
To access the telemetry information being provided by a given piece of equipment, the datacenter operator may establish a communication link between the given piece of equipment and a monitoring server. This arrangement can be problematic when there are numerous pieces of equipment being monitored at any given time since it requires the datacenter operator to expend resources in establishing communication links with each piece of monitored equipment.
Moreover, obtaining the telemetry information from the equipment being monitored is laborious when there are numerous pieces of equipment involved. Depending on the arrangement, a datacenter operator may have to query each piece of equipment individually. Furthermore, in the event of equipment failure, the datacenter operator may have to investigate where the failed equipment is located. Locating failed equipment in a datacenter can also be problematic since the location of a piece of equipment may be subject to change. This dynamic arrangement requires time and effort on behalf of the datacenter operator to find the equipment failure.